Making the Case for Fantasy

“Fantasy is sometimes dismissed as childish, or escapist, but I take what I am doing very, very seriously. For me fantasy isn’t about escaping from reality, it’s about re-encountering the challenges of the real world, but externalized and transformed. It’s an emotionally raw genre — it forces you to lay yourself open on the page. It doesn’t traffic in ironies and caveats. When you cast a spell you can’t be kidding, you have to mean it. I felt myself connecting with a much older literary tradition, one that went further back, before Joyce and Woolf and Hemingway, back before the modern novel in English was even born, before literature became so closely identified with realism. Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, Homer: those writers trafficked in witches and fairies and ghosts and monsters. Why shouldn’t I?”

“What makes for a good fantasy novel? The kind that isn’t fantastic. It’s just creating a new reality. Really, a good fantasy is just a mirror of our own world, but one whose reflection is subtly distorted” from ‘Terry Pratchett: By the Book’

Compiled by Ian Keith Anderson who has read (but not yet written) fantasy all his reading life